You know something? I like this! Love the color (a rich purple has always been a popular color with me), and it still looks easy to read and uncluttered.

Nice to see some templates for the 2.5 series!

You mentioned the gradient seems a little flat. If you are talking about something in the purple (or in the blue on the blue set) I'm a little confused, because I saw no gradients in use.

I like it in general, but spending some more time looking at it, I start feeling it needs a little more purple (or blue or red or whatever) on the topic page ... not a lot ... too much would be overkill, and over-saturate the things ... but the only purple is at the top and bottom of the page, and the individual posts blend too much together for me. I end up feeling like I need to see at least a small bit of color in between the posts to separate them.

But that may be just me ... I like them, but the posts blend together too much. Some very nice work, and much needed for this version.

Don't know if it would work for anybody else, but I could see either a drop shadow kind of thing lake Carsten was doing or a simple horizontal rule across part of the screen between posts ... not much, just a half point or point line between the posts ... not adding too much more, but the slight breadth of color between the posts.

My guess would be something like 75% of the width, but who knows, might ever work with something like 5 or 10% long, just a little inch wide blip or something.

And maybe I'm wrong entirely and it would look horrid or something. I dunno.

But that red one will really grab your eyeballs, and bounce them around a bit, eh?

I'll check it out. While I feel a touch more color is needed, I also agree that it would take very little to make it too much.

That's along the lines of what I was thinking of, but not as wide for the rule. You know something? I'm going to have to think about maybe using one of these for my new dream forum ... I do keep liking the look.

Thinking of doing the name the same way you did that YaBB, but the outline being rainbow colored, rather than gray. Might work nicely ... no matter which color of template might be used.

Don't know about dreamy background images, though ... probably depend on if I could ever come up with one.

Have to find my really old version of photoshop and install it, make use of the masking effects on a gradient background to do that. Wonder where that disk is .... ?Haven't used it for a while.

But I think that could work quite nicely.

Um ... sorry for hijacking your template thread with this stuff!

I like the templates derek ..... Great work .....

Maybe you can use the template switcher mod, so the user can switch all the templates without login